Beyond Business - Today's news, tomorrow's business strategies

In my experience, the majority focus on maintaining the status quo. They don’t want to rock the boat, risk ruining their reputation or career. They may feel overworked and under empowered, so why highlight something that may cause more work? Or perhaps they are complacent – the company has always prospered so why change? To those I’d shout “look out the window!” the market has changed.

Most people intuitively know right from wrong. But many “assume” someone else, far smarter than themselves has researched options. In turn, whether they agree or not, they “reflect” the attitudes and approaches of others to conform. There will always be exceptions, mavericks and inspired leaders, but they will be the minority … and not always privy to what happens in the day to day business of getting things done.

Back in the early nineties, I came across the work of Tony Robbins. He says beliefs and attitudes are shaped by the environment around us. Through a series of experiments and experiences (growing up), we build “assumptions” that direct our actions. Most of the time, we can’t even explain why – we put it down to intuition. But what if those assumptions are wrong? What if they are blinding or constraining us? Tony would encourage you to challenge them on a regular basis - free yourself from the bad and introduce positive ones.

In Art Kleiner’s interview with Mintzberg, MBA professors challenged their role. Instead of lecturing, they leveraged the wisdom of crowds. Each student has on average, 15 years of managerial experience. Each brings real world challenges to the classroom and now collectively aims to solve them. Not from decades old text books, but from practical experience. The idea is they have a better chance of getting an answer for today’s problems.

Tor Dahl uses this principle to help organizations lift productivity. Thus far, following a structured path, he has accumulated over ten thousand years of experience and improved productivity for each of his clients by a minimum 300 percent – without them shedding a single job.

I can’t help thinking about Mintzbergs students and Tony’s philosophy. What experiences have enlightened or clouded their judgment? If there are 30, 60 or even 90 students – is that enough of a sample to remove the blinkers? Probably better than the traditional method, but is there another way? What if you could capture all those experiments and experiences and test them – analytically – in other words “prove it”.

You can. Tor has written a whole thesis on it. But let’s take strategy as an example. It starts life as a hypothesis. A hypothesis built on experience and assumptions. A 2008 Harvard Business School paper looked at how you could test strategy with multiple performance measures. They studied the use of a Balanced Scorecard in a company that pursued a flawed strategy for a number of years. Their conclusion “formal statistical tests of the hypotheses underlying the firm's balanced scorecard and strategy map reveal problems with the strategy on a timelier basis.” The lesson here is that you must challenge the status quo regularly – never assume that a method or strategy will always be best. SAS Strategy Management has recently been updated to make this process easier than ever before – check it out.

The bigger challenge is that you probably don’t have all the data, because you have never perhaps questioned what really drives value – you’ve relied on assumptions and data that are easy to get. Dig deeper, ask the questions, begin collecting and proving.

And so to the article on crowd sourcing and fashion – what’s the link? Answer: unstructured data. People are communicating faster than ever. They are sharing experiences and preferences via facebook, myspace, twitter, blogs and online forums – everyone is connected. Through their words, they influence others. Take a look at your own online forums. Your customers are probably providing great insights based on their experiences – good and bad. The challenge is there’s just too much of it. It would take forever to merely read, let alone recognize the connections and act on them.

Take heart. Tor conducts many interviews. He listens. He takes notes – reams of the stuff. But then he uses text mining to find patterns. Patterns that help explain instinct. Patterns that cut through the noise to zero in on root causes and linkages to that over than ten thousand years of experience he has collected. Our language shares far more than numbers alone. But today’s technology makes it a snap to decipher.

The world is changing. Business is reinventing itself. Are you ready to leverage the experience of others, or do you assume someone else has that under control? What’s your evidence?